Tasted 2 Times With Consistent Notes While the 1947 Petrus is a big, juicy, succulent, fruity wine, the 1945 remains a backward, tannic colossus needing another 5-10 years of cellaring. The color reveals more purple hues than the 1947, and the nose offers aromas of black fruits, licorice, truffles, and smoked meat. Massively-constituted, with formidably high tannin and extract levels, this sleeping giant may evolve into another perfect example of Petrus.

The 1945 Petrus is a wine that I presumed I would never taste, my solitary encounter a very suspect bottle that I believe to be fake. Not here. This 1945 is actually served blind as an addition to the smorgasbord of vintages already tasted and boy, does it deliver. Quite deep in colour, it has a sublime bouquet of red and black fruit with a subtle marine-like tincture, a touch of brine perhaps, intermingling with autumn leaves. It gradually builds with aeration although like coeval vintages I have encountered, it is not intense or powerful. The palate is medium-bodied and bewitching in terms of purity, perfectly balanced with discrete traces of camphor, turning more towards cough candy with aeration. If you took away vintage and chateau you would simply describe this as a heavenly, almost Burgundy-like Pomerol. I suspect that maybe 20 years ago it was far more vigorous and fruit-driven. The fruit has ebbed since then but what remains is a graceful, almost elegiac Petrus that clearly always knew how to grow old. Tasted at the Petrus dinner at Hide restaurant in London.